ZombieCake said:
A 2TB hard drive starts around ?60 these days. I keep two separate back ups. I suppose convenience of access is a factor for cloud storage as well.
There are two major considerations here, one is do you want a back up of everything at every moment and the other is how low a risk is acceptable.
If you want a reliable back up at all times then you need a set up which copies the data across multiple drives, usually 4 is recommended. It is known as RAID, see
https://getprostorage.com/blog/understanding-raid-storage/ for a description.
I am much more relaxed. I back up to an external hard drive every day or so. I then back up that external hard drive every week to a drive in another computer located in a different room. (That is to minimise the risk of water leak damage impacting both computers plus the external drive.)
In fact I have two drives in the other computer called E and F. I back up E to F and then back up the external drive to E. That way if there is a virus, I have an up to two week old copy on F which hopefully is not infected when the infection is discovered on my machine or possibly on the external drive or worse on E.
If you want to further lower the risk, then backing up to a drive away from your home is the next step. (That covers the risk of a fire in your house or worse an earthquake.) I know of friends who back up to a drive at their children's home, others use Goggle's My Drive or equivalent. I did investigate putting a drive in my detached garage but hard drives do require reasonable temperature and humidity which won't be achieved mid winter. It also assumes you have a reasonable internet connection and can tolerate shifting large quantities of data when you get home after a two week holiday with tens of GB of photos.
As has been mentioned you also need to ensure your drives are by different manufacturers, are preferably of different ages and are replaced every few years so as to further reduce the risk of failure.
No doubt I have missed a few other risk minimisation actions (like readability of files - any one remember .sam?). But what stops me is the thought of when I drop dead, what will happen to all the material? I sense my family will just chuck it away once they have pulled out those bits they want. The British Caving Library currently only takes paper based material and I don't have a laser jet printer (and archival paper) to print out all the material I thought might be of interest to other cavers in decades to come.
But as TOR says the key thing for him is getting a link from his images to the sites where he displays them. That sounds like setting up one's own web site.
Whilst I accept a paper base is likely to have a better shelf life, I am not so sure about photo images, I fear ink jet printed images may fade over the decades. Certainly it has already been noted that hand written minutes of recent origin are already degrading due to poor paper and ink quailty.